Federico Tajariol

Seeing the Face and Observing the Actions: The Effects of Nonverbal Cues on Mediated Tutoring Dialogue

Mediated communication technologies, conveying verbal and nonverbal cues, are more and more employed in learning activities. Nevertheless, their effects on teacher-student interaction have been not clearly stated yet. Through two experimental studies, we investigated on the effects of nonverbal communication cues (kinesic and ostensive-inferential) on synchronous mediated tutoring dialogue, in which a tutor and a student communicate through audio-video communication tools. The outcomes show that kinesic cues lead tutor to monitor more carefully learners ongoing task and to encourage much more them, while ostensive-inferential cues improve learners task performance and lead both tutor and student to focus better on tutoring speech acts.

A Semiotic and Cognitive Approach to the Semantic Indexation of Digital Learning Resources

This paper presents the design of a semantic system to index digital learning resources according to the metadata describing their cognitive features. By “cognitive feature” we mean the cognitive activities (e.g., reading, listening, body interactions, etc.) associated with the form of presentation (e.g., text, audio, image, etc.). The semantic system includes a parser, which detects the semiotic components of a resource, and two ontologies that formally describe the cognitive features and the semiotic descriptors, as well their association.

Sharing Radiation Measurements Through Social Media: A Methodological User-Oriented Proposal Set of Guidelines

Radiation measurements are key information for risk communication in post-nuclear accident situations. Among the different social media platforms, Twitter offers automated accounts which have been used to share the readings, but often in an incomplete way from the perspective of data sharing and risk communication between citizen and radiation experts. In this paper, the authors investigate the requirements for radiation measurements, by analysing the perceived usefulness of several metadata items that may go along the measurement itself. They carried out a benchmark of existing usages, and conducted a survey with both experts and lay citizens. They thus produced a set of guidelines regarding the metadata that should be used. Furthermore, they created a prototype of a software tool to publish complete measurements and metadata containing suitable information for both experts and citizen based on the requirements.

A SKOS Radiation Safety Thesaurus for People Living in Contaminated Territories

During the long-term period of a nuclear disaster, people living in contaminated territories need to gain knowledge in order to take protective actions. While existing representations of this knowledge are designed for experts, we propose a thesaurus of radiation safety built for the lay people. We present a methodology to extract such a thesaurus from a set of documents addressed to non-experts. Extension of the corpus and implementation of more automated processes are still required to improve the resulting thesaurus.